This is a place for me to share some of my work. On this site you will find many examples of micro lessons. Many of them will take the form of 1 to 10 minutes video clips or short to the point articles. I believe that micro lessons could be a powerful tool that we can use with students. I hope that you enjoy this Blog site. This site will discuss educational technology as a tool for student learning. Site Publisher Fred Sharpsteen
email contact sharpstf@gmail.com

Monday, December 31, 2012

Learning today takes place anywhere and anytime. To meet the needs of today's connected learner, today's educator needs to be fluent in new media literacies. The Teaching Online: Becoming a Connected Educator eCourse will prepare you to be an online professor, teach online courses in blended environments such as a virtual school, or teaching blended courses in traditional settings.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

A compilation of ten videos on the history of the English language. I compiled the videos into a film to make it a little easier to watch them all. While I do not own the originals. They originals are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Licence agreement. The origin webpage can be found here http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/english-language/the-h...

Friday, December 28, 2012

The basic algorithms of human thought, Ray Kurzweil says, just aren't that complicated. From an observation about the weather to a sophisticated joke, cognition at every level operates according to a few simple principles. Researchers have gotten lost, he says, in the diversity and complexity of individual neurons and are missing the bigger picture.

Transcript - Well if we talk about what is it that we should train children and adults because I think we need lifelong education to do. It's not rote learning, which unfortunately it's still the model of education throughout much of the world. I think actually the United States is better than a lot of other areas interms of having more flexible approaches to what it is we're trying to get children to do.

Many areas of the world are really still have a model of education of rote learning, which is obsolete because we carry all that information on our belts. We don't need to remember it all. But we do need to be able to solve actual problems with knowledge. We need to find the right knowledge; yes, we have search engines to help us and the search engines will get better, but really need the right strategies to find the right information. We need to be able to create new knowledge.

Knowledge is doubling every 13 months by some measures.And knowledge isn't just a database. Knowledge is a symphony or a jazz band or a poem or a novel or a new scientific insight or an invention. These are also examples of knowledge. My philosophy ofeducation is learn by doing. Singularity University, which I co-founded with Peter Diamandis and I'm Chancellor of -- has that philosophy with the core curriculum is the students self-organizing into small teams and they take on a grand challenge like to solve the water problem of the world and maybe they will actually succeed indoing that -- the goal is to actually do -- solve major challenges inten years.

Or maybe they'll solve a piece of it, or maybe they won'tsolve it at all, but they'll still learn something. If I think about what I've learned in my career, it's from my own projects and whether they succeed or fail, that's really the best way to learn. And there's versions of that we can bring into every level. We certainly see many college kids started major revolutions, including political revolutions but also technological revolutions, with no equipment other than their notebook computer.

According to Dr. Wiliam, the only way to raise student achievement is through sustained investment in teacher professional development focused on minute-to-minute, day-by-day formative assessment. Since effective implementation of such formative assessment requires considerable changes in what teachers do daily, it also requires the formation of building-based teacher learning communities (TLCs) in which teachers are held accountable and provide support for one another.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson presents his research on how social and emotional learning can affect the brain. Read more about the topic, including how to use social and emotional learning to stop bullying, on our Edutopia website: http://www.edutopia.org/social-emotional-learning

The education visionary speaks about innovation in education and the critical need for businesses to better support educational programs, at the Dreamforce conference in 2007. Tip: Did you know you can "favorite" this video to bookmark it?

Educational technology pioneer Salman Khan maps how online learning tools can help physical classrooms evolve to become hubs for creativity and hands-on experiences, and how Khan Academy and the Discovery Lab summer camp fit into that big picture.

Integrating technology with classroom practice can be a great way to strengthen engagement by linking students to a global audience, turning them into creators of digital media, and helping them practice collaboration skills that will prepare them for the future. For more about technology integration, visit http://www.edutopia.org/technology-integration.

How to use Quizlet.com to enhance instruction, study for content areas, allow student directed learning.

Quizlet is a free website providing learning tools for students, including flashcards, study and game modes. It was created by high school sophomore Andrew Sutherland in 2005 and now contains over 400 million study sets. All of the material is user-generated.

The iPad Mini and Nexus 7 are competing in the smaller tablet space. People really like tablets of this size because they can be held with one hand, they can fit into a pocket (usually), and they're great for reading and web browsing.

The iPad Mini is the more expensive of the two, starting at $329 for the 16GB WiFi model. At higher price points, more storage and LTE connectivity is available. It has an A5 dual-core chip with 512MB of RAM. The display is 7.9" and 1024x768 resolution and 162ppi.

The Nexus 7 is just $199 for 16GB. You can double the storage for $249, then add HSPA+ data (coming soon) for another $50. It has a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU with 1GB of RAM. The display is 7.0" and 1280x800 resolution with a 215ppi.

This is a demonstration of PaperCut's Web Print solution. It is a 100% driver-less and browser-based user printing solution and works by allowing you to upload your document to a server that then prints for you.

This tour is taken in an education context, to show you just how simple it is for a student to use. Web Print reduces the work required to support students printing from their own laptops, by eliminating domain and printer configuration (e.g. eliminate the need to join student owned systems to the Active Directory Domain).

When their laptop is connected to the wifi network, a student can access Web Print and start printing immediately. The PaperCut web user interface is accessible using any web-browser.

This demonstration covers browsing to the file and selecting it for upload to the server. PaperCut's Web Print allows for uploading many common document formats. All printing activity is of course tracked and controlled by PaperCut (e.g. print quotas).

Web Print data remains within the local network, and jobs are processed on the local server.

For more information you can visit PaperCut website for the product tour.

This was created by Jennifer Alman for the Emergent Technologies in a Collaborative Culture class at Full Sail University, It highlights the features and benefits of using Twiducate for collaboration in an educational setting.

Dr. Rod Rock and Mr. Shawn Ryan explain how Clarkston teachers are exploring and testing ideas for the use of technology in our classrooms. In classrooms across the district different technologies including, smart phones, iPads, iPods, netbooks, data projectors, streaming video, and the latest software are put to the test.

This link will take you to the Michigan 5-4-3-2-1 plan for getting us ready for 2014 and the Smarter Balanced assessment. The easy steps in this plan are really the technical issues. The first hurdle is

5. One to One Access and Connectivity:
the cost of equipment has dropped and according to mores law will continue to cost have as much for twice the speed ever 18 months. We can see historically over the last 15 to 20 years that this has been true.

4. Consolidation of Business, Data, and Technology Services:
Now we start to make it a little harder as these are people issues and systems issues and politics. But it can happen as long as people go into this with an open mind.

3. Teacher Capacity:
This is an issues that our Higher Ed has yet to address. Student leaving many colleges and the state has no requirement for student competency in 21st century learning skills and many are not exposed to it until they take a program in Technology education for a master degree.

2. Digital Content and Assessments: This is the frame works for assessment and not a curriculum to get our students ready for there future careers. There is much work to be done here yet and only time will tell if we can get the different Silos in education to work together to create a learning environment that will sustain this.

1. 21st Century Learning Environments:
The holly grail of education and what does this really mean. Is it Personal Learning Networks (PLN)? or Project Based Learning (PBL)? or is it Collaborative learning. Yet it may be all the above in order for student to no longer sit in rows of chairs as a teacher lectures to them.

Here is the article that I based this Blog on
Bruce Umpstead is the State Director of Educational
Technology and Data Coordination, Office of
Education Improvement and Innovation, Michigan
Department of Education. umpsteadb@michigan.gov

In our latest interview, we chat with Mitch Resnick, a professor at the MIT media lab, about developing educational technology that is changing the landscape of learning with his Lifelong Kindergarten project.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Dr. Michio Kaku speaks about how America's poor educational system has created a shortage of Americans who can perform high skilled technology jobs. As a result, America's H-1B Genius visa is used to attract immigrants who are skilled enough to perform these jobs.
Full Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceEog1XS5OI&feature=related

Devices should also have at least a 10-inch screen, a mechanical keyboard, headphones, and wired or wireless Internet access. IT administrators should also have tools to temporarily disable any features, functionalities, and applications that could present a security risk during test administration.
Smarter Balanced noted that while these minimum requirements for technology are adequate to support student assessments, they may not meet minimum requirements to support student instruction.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Synopsis:
Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Some thoughts on teachers, students and the Future of Education.
The book kid me is holding in the video is The Way Things Work. If there's a bookish child in your life, you should get them a copy: http://goo.gl/QdreH

Also I don't think that the idea of Digital Aristotle is sci-fi, but if you *do* want to read the sci-fi version, I highly recommend The Diamond Age: http://goo.gl/uvbx6

My life changed when I had the opportunity to take a class from Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School. I went on to write a book with him, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, and found a company with him called Innosight Institute, which is a non-profit think tank that--yes, there is a theme here--applies Christensen's theories of disruptive innovation to help solve problems in the social sector. I am the executive director of the education practice at Innosight Institute, where I lead a growing team focused on transforming the education system into a student-centric one that can customize an education for the individual needs of each child.